How did Star Trek: The Next Generation become a meme sensation?

Mashable

Running from 1987 to 1994, Star Trek: TNG was "the only Trek series to achieve mainstream success during its original run, with the first episode attracting about 27 million viewers and the final episode reaching more than 31 million," says Chris Taylor. "After that, TNG was syndicated on local stations throughout the 1990s and 2000s. Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart) was a starship captain to rival James T. Kirk in the popular imagination, but the rest of the ensemble (Riker, Data, Geordi, Worf, Troi, even Wesley Crusher) were household names too. All that provided fertile ground for denizens of the early internet. A show everyone knew (nerds who loved the World Wide Web especially); a show that was likely to be on TV as alternative entertainment when your 56K modem crapped out; a show where everyone took themselves very seriously but that looked hilarious when chopped into five-second increments: in retrospect, TNG was bound to become a meme-maker's paradise. One of its most popular episodes, 'Darmok,=' unintentionally predicted a future where language is dominated by cultural references — and became a meme itself. Many of the earliest TNG memes were image macros and GIFs, which were all a pre-broadband world could handle, but you'd see the occasional Adobe Flash video too. They were collected on image boards such as Newgrounds, founded in 1995, and You're the Man Now Dog (YTMND), founded in 2001. Both were proto-Reddits, where memes could be upvoted or downvoted. When YouTube was founded in 2005, TNG parody videos such as the 'Picard song' were already there, just waiting to be beamed up."